Thursday, April 17, 2014

Jews have reportedly been told to 'register' with pro-Russian forces in the east Ukrainian city of Donetsk.

They were also told they would need to provide a list of property they own as well as being ordered to pay a fee or face the threat of deportation.

U.S. officials in Washington say leaflets bearing the chilling order have recently appeared in the city amid pro and anti-Russian protests as tensions rise in the area.

It comes after Jews leaving a synagogue in the city of Donetsk were reportedly told they had to 'register' with Ukranians trying to make the city part of Russia.

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Sinister: A leaflet distributed in Donetsk, Ukraine calling for all Jews over 16 years old to 'register'. The leaflet also demanded the city's Jews supply a detailed list of all the property they own, or else have their citizenship revoked

»Putin on Eastern Ukraine17/04/14 18:13 from NYT > EuropePresident Vladimir V. Putin of Russia addressed the escalating crisis in Ukraine during his annual televised question-and-answer session with the public in Moscow.

»Results 1-15 of 32917/04/14 17:44 from SEARCH RESULTS - WSJ.comResults 1-15 of 329 Pro-Russia Activists Deny Involvement in Anti-Semitic Incident Leaders of the antigovernment uprising in the Ukrainian city of Donetsk have denied involvement in an incident in which unknown men handed out anti-Semiti...

Jews have reportedly been told to 'register' with pro-Russian forces in the east Ukrainian city of Donetsk.

They were also told they would need to provide a list of property they own as well as being ordered to pay a fee or face the threat of deportation.

U.S. officials in Washington say leaflets bearing the chilling order have recently appeared in the city amid pro and anti-Russian protests as tensions rise in the area.

It comes after Jews leaving a synagogue in the city of Donetsk were reportedly told they had to 'register' with Ukranians trying to make the city part of Russia.

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Sinister: A leaflet distributed in Donetsk, Ukraine calling for all Jews over 16 years old to 'register'. The leaflet also demanded the city's Jews supply a detailed list of all the property they own, or else have their citizenship revoked

United States Secretary of State John Kerry has condemned the distribution of leaflets in eastern Ukraine demanding that Jews identify themselves.

Mr Kerry described the leaflets as 'grotesque and beyond unacceptable' as he hit out at instances of religious intolerance that have been inflaming tensions in the nation.

The State Department says it is looking into who is responsible but takes the threat seriously no matter who is behind the leaflets.

Mr Kerry, who is currently in Geneva for talks on Ukraine, also denounced apparent threats to members of the Russian Orthodox Church from members of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.

He said no such behavior could be tolerated. it is not yet clear who exactly is responsible for producing the leaflets.

According to USA Today, the leaflet says all people of Jewish descent over 16 should report to the Commissioner for Nationalities in the Donetsk Regional Administration building and 'register.'

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U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry (left), seen here with Russian Foreign minister Sergei Lavrov earlier today, has blasted the leaflets as 'grotesque and beyond unacceptable'

It goes on to explain that the reason for this is that leaders of the Jewish community of Ukraine supported Bendery Junta in reference to the leader of a nationalist group fighting for independence at the end of the Second World War.

'REPORT TO US': THE LETTER TELLING JEWS TO REGISTER

'Dear Ukraine citizens of Jewish nationality,' the flyer begins.

'Due to the fact that the leaders of the Jewish community of Ukraine supported Bendery Junta' - a reference to Stepan Bandera, the leader of the Ukrainian nationalist movement which fought for Ukrainian independence at the end of World War II. - 'and oppose the pro-Slavic People's Republic of Donetsk, (the interim government) has decided that all citizens of Jewish descent, over 16 years of age and residing within the republic's territory are required to report to the Commissioner for Nationalities in the Donetsk Regional Administration building and register.'

The leaflet says Jews should provide ID and passports and 'religious documents of family members, as well as documents establishing the rights to all real estate property that belongs to you'.

The letter features the flag of the so-called Donetsk Republic, a self-proclaimed state declared earlier this month by several hundred activists who occupied the Regional Administration Building and the City Hall buildings in the city.

In March leaders of Ukraine’s Jewish communities published an open letter denouncing Russian anit-semitism and criticising Putin.

The Kiev-based Vaad of Ukraine is an umbrella group that says it supports '265 Jewish organizations from 94 cities of Ukraine'.

The letter, written in Russian and co-signed by 21 Jewish leaders — including the Vaad leadership, supports Ukrainian sovereignty 'in the name of national minorities and Ukraine’s Jewish community.'

Putin has justified his military action by claiming that he is acting to protect Ukraine’s Russian-speaking population and claims that Ukraine’s new government is composed of 'fascists and neo-Nazis'.

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Tension: A Ukrainian soldier at a road block on the outskirts of Izyum, Eastern Ukraine

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A pro-Russia activist stands guard in front of the flag of the so-called Donetsk Republic in the eastern Ukrainian city of Slavyansk today. The flag appears on the letter

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Pro-Russian armed soldiers pictured on a tank in front of the Slavyansk City Hall in Ukraine. Pro-Russian protesters have occupied the government buildings in eastern cities such as Donetsk and Luhansk, declaring independence from the capital Kiev

But the letter, claiming to represent Russian-speaking Jews, said: 'Your certainty about the growth of anti-Semitism in Ukraine, which you expressed at your press conference, also does not correspond to the actual facts,'

'Perhaps you got Ukraine confused with Russia, where Jewish organizations have noticed growth in anti-Semitic tendencies last year.'

During the Soviet era, the Soviet Union and countries within its sphere of influence were accused of persecuting Jews. Josef Stalin was said by numerous sources to despise Jews and under Brezhnev Jews faced discrimination.

Mr Kerry has been attending a conference on the unfolding crisis in Ukraine.

Parties including representatives from Ukraine, Russia and the European Union, issued a joint statement which read: 'The participants strongly condemned and rejected all expressions of extremism, racism and religious intolerance, including anti-semitism.'

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Jewish groups have expressed their concern over growing anti-semitism in Russia. Pictured, Russian ultra nationalists make Nazi signs during a rally in Moscow

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GENEVA — The United States, Russia, Ukraine and the European Union reached an agreement here on Thursday evening that calls for armed pro-Russian bands to give up the government buildings they have seized in eastern Ukraine and outlines other steps to de-escalate the crisis.

Secretary of State John Kerry described the package of measures as an important first step to avert “a complete and total implosion” in eastern Ukraine and said that it could be followed by negotiation of more far-reaching steps to ease a crisis in which violence seemed to be growing by the day.

But President Obama sounded a cautious if not skeptical note in Washington. “I don’t think we can be sure of anything at this point,” he said, but there is a chance “that diplomacy may de-escalate the situation.”

He added: “We’re not going to know if there is follow through for several days.”

The agreement, described in a joint statement, does not specifically require Russia to remove the approximately 40,000 troops it has on Ukraine’s border, as Mr. Obama has demanded.

Nor does it commit Russia to holding direct talks with the interim Ukrainian government, which has been another American demand. The agreement also does not mention the Russian annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea Peninsula last month.

The agreement on “initial concrete steps to de-escalate tensions and restore security” in Ukraine followed more than six hours of talks here that involved Mr. Kerry, his Russian counterpart, Sergey V. Lavrov, Ukraine’s acting foreign minister, Andrii Deshchytsia, and Catherine Ashton, the foreign policy chief for the European Union.

It calls on all sides in Ukraine to refrain from violence or provocative behavior and rejects all forms of intolerance, including anti-Semitism, which Mr. Kerry said had emerged as a worry in eastern Ukraine.

“All illegal armed groups must be disarmed,” the statement declares. “All illegally seized building must be returned to legitimate owners; all illegally occupied streets, squares and other public places in Ukrainian cities and towns must be vacated.”

Mr. Lavrov said the deal was “largely based on compromise” and that a settlement of the crisis was primarily the responsibility of Ukraine’s. Mr. Lavrov made the remarks at a news conference that he gave before Mr. Kerry had spoken.

In recent days, the United States and other Western nations have repeatedly charged that Russian agents had orchestrated the seizure of government buildings in eastern Ukraine.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia denied the allegations in a question-and-answer session on Thursday on Russian television. But he also said Russia reserved the right to intervene militarily and he used new language that asserted Russia’s historical claims to parts of eastern Ukraine.

Under the agreement negotiated in Geneva, the Ukrainian government would grant amnesty to protesters who leave the government buildings they have occupied and agree to give up their arms, unless they are suspected of murder or other capital crimes.

International monitors from the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe, a 57-nation group that includes Russia, are to play a “leading role” in helping Ukrainians carry out the de-escalation measures.

Ukraine, the agreement says, should also ensure that reform of its constitution involves “outreach to all of Ukraine’s regions and political constituencies.” And the statement endorses the importance of economic support to Ukraine.

Mr. Kerry said at a news conference that it was critical that the measures be “translated immediately into actions” and that he hoped more far-reaching steps could follow.

“None of us leave here with the sense that the job is done,” he added. “We do not envision this as the full measure of de-escalation.”

The measures requiring armed groups to vacate government buildings in eastern Ukraine was singled out by Western officials as an especially significant measure, and Mr. Kerry made it clear that the Obama administration would hold Russia accountable to see that it was carried out.

“The responsibility will lie with those who have organized” the groups, said Mr. Kerry who added that the United States had made it clear that Russia had a “huge impact on all of those forces.”

“If there is not progress over the course of these next days and we don’t see a movement in the right direction, then there will be additional sanctions, additional costs as a consequence,” Mr. Kerry said.

In response to a question, Mr. Kerry insisted that the United States had not dropped objections to Russia’s annexation of Crimea, but acknowledged that it had not been the focus of the meeting.

“We didn’t come here to talk about Crimea,” he said.

While there has been no Russian commitment to withdraw forces from Ukraine’s border on a specific schedule, Mr. Kerry said the Russian side had suggested that the presence would be reduced as the crisis eased.

The talks were held at the same luxury hotel where five years ago Hillary Rodham Clinton, who was then serving as the secretary of state, presented Mr. Lavrov with a red “reset” button intended to signal a fresh start in the White House’s relations with the Kremlin.

The purpose of the Thursday session was to bring Ukraine and Russia to the same table, with the United States and the European Union participating, and foster a dialogue on political and security issues

As the talks began, all sides had an incentive to avoid a diplomatic confrontation.

Russia wanted to avoid the perception that it was being uncooperative in the search for a diplomatic solution and, thus, discourage Western nations from imposing new economic sanctions.

American officials have also sought to give Ukraine time to hold its May 25 presidential election without more extensive Russian interference.

European nations, for their part, would prefer not to impose wide-ranging economic sanctions, which could hurt trade with Moscow.

The deeper question was whether the statement issued on Thursday would open the door to a diplomatic resolution of the Ukraine crisis or remain a limited step that bypasses core issues like the degree of federalism in Ukraine, the presence of an intimidating Russian force near Ukraine’s border and Russia’s reluctance to recognize the legitimacy of Ukraine’s new government.

Gabriel García Márquez, the Colombian novelist whose “One Hundred Years of Solitude” established him as a giant of 20th-century literature, died on Thursday at his home in Mexico City. He was 87.

His death was confirmed by Cristóbal Pera, his former editor at Random House.

Mr. García Márquez, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, wrote fiction rooted in a mythical Latin American landscape of his own creation, but his appeal was universal. His books were translated into dozens of languages. He was among a select roster of canonical writers — Dickens, Tolstoy and Hemingway among them — who were embraced both by critics and by a mass audience.

“Each new work of his is received by expectant critics and readers as an event of world importance,” the Swedish Academy of Letters said in awarding him the Nobel.

Mr. García Márquez was considered the supreme exponent, if not the creator, of the literary genre known as magic realism, in which the miraculous and the real converge. In his novels and stories, storms rage for years, flowers drift from the skies, tyrants survive for centuries, priests levitate and corpses fail to decompose. And, more plausibly, lovers rekindle their passion after a half century apart.

Magic realism, he said, sprang from Latin America’s history of vicious dictators and romantic revolutionaries, of long years of hunger, illness and violence. In accepting his Nobel, Mr. García Márquez said: “Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination. For our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable.”

Like many Latin American intellectuals and artists, Mr. García Márquez felt impelled to speak out on the political issues of his day. He viewed the world from a left-wing perspective, bitterly opposing Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the right-wing Chilean dictator, and unswervingly supporting Fidel Castro in Cuba. Mr. Castro became such a close friend that Mr. García Márquez showed him drafts of his unpublished books.

No draft had more impact than the one for “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” Mr. García Márquez’s editor began reading it at home one rainy day, and as he read page after page by this unknown Colombian author, his excitement mounted. Soon he called the Argentine novelist Tomás Eloy Martínez and summoned him urgently to the home.

Mr. Eloy Martinez remembered entering the foyer with wet shoes and encountering pages strewn across the floor by the editor in his eagerness to read through the work. They were the first pages of a book that in 1967 would vault Mr. García Márquez onto the world stage. He later authorized an English translation, by Gregory Rabassa. In Spanish or English, readers were tantalized from its opening sentences:

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Col. Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of 20 adobe houses built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.”

“One Hundred Years of Solitude” would sell more than 20 million copies. The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda called it “the greatest revelation in the Spanish language since ‘Don Quixote.’ ” The novelist William Kennedy hailed it as “the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race.”

Mr. García Márquez was rattled by the praise. He grew to hate “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” he said in interviews, because he feared his subsequent work would not measure up to it in readers’ eyes. He need not have worried. Almost all his 15 other novels and short-story collections were lionized by critics and devoured by readers.

Gabriel García Márquez was born in Aracataca, a small town near Colombia’s Caribbean coast, on March 6, 1927. His father, a postal clerk and telegraph operator, could barely support his wife and 12 children; Gabriel, the oldest, spent his early childhood living in the large, ramshackle house of his maternal grandparents. It influenced his writing; it seemed inhabited, he said, by the ghosts his grandmother conjured in the stories she told.

His maternal grandfather, a retired army colonel, was also an influence: “the most important figure of my life,” Mr. García Márquez said. The grandfather bore a marked resemblance to Colonel Buendía, the protagonist of “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” and the book’s mythical village of Macondo draws heavily on Aracataca.

In his 2002 memoir, “Living to Tell the Tale,” Mr. García Márquez recalled a river trip back to Aracataca in 1950, his first trip there since childhood.

“The first thing that struck me,” he wrote, “was the silence. A material silence I could have identified blindfolded among all the silences in the world. The reverberation of the heat was so intense that you seemed to be looking at everything through undulating glass. As far as the eye could see there was no recollection of human life, nothing that was not covered by a faint sprinkling of burning dust.”

Much of his fiction unfolds in or near Macondo, just as William Faulkner, whom he admired, invented Yoknapatawpha County as the Mississippi setting for some of his own novels.

Mr. García Márquez moved to Bogotá as a teenager. He studied law there but never received a degree; he turned instead to journalism.

The late 1940s and early ’50s in Colombia were a period of civil strife known as La Violencia. The ideological causes were nebulous, but the savagery was stark: as many as 300,000 deaths. La Violencia would become the background for several of his novels.

Mr. García Márquez eked out a living writing for newspapers in Cartagena and then Barranquilla, where he lived in the garret of a brothel and saw a future in literature. “It was a bohemian life: finish at the paper at 1 in the morning, then write a poem or a short story until about 3, then go out to have a beer,” he said in an interview in 1996. “When you went home at dawn, ladies who were going to Mass would cross to the other side of the street for fear that you were either drunk or intending to mug or rape them.”

“I cannot imagine how anyone could even think of writing a novel without having at least a vague of idea of the ten thousand years of literature that have gone before,” Mr. García Márquez said.But, he added, “I’ve never tried to imitate authors I’ve admired. On the contrary, I’ve done all I could not to imitate them.”As a journalist he scored a scoop when he interviewed a sailor who had been portrayed by the Colombian government as the heroic survivor of a navy destroyer lost at sea. The sailor admitted to him that the ship had been carrying a heavy load of contraband household goods, which unloosed during a storm and caused the ship to list enough to sink. His report, in 1955, infuriated Gen. Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, the country’s dictator, and Mr. García Márquez fled to Europe. He spent two years there as a foreign correspondent.

Mr. García Márquez was less impressed by Western Europe than many Latin American writers, who looked to the Old World as their cultural fountainhead. His dispatches often reflected his belief that Europeans were patronizing toward Latin America even though their own society was in decline.

He echoed these convictions in his Nobel address. Europeans, he said, “insist on measuring us with the yardstick that they use for themselves, forgetting that the ravages of life are not the same for all, and that the quest for our own identity is just as arduous and bloody for us as it was for them.”

Mr. García Márquez lost his job when his newspaper was shut down by the Rojas Pinilla regime. Stranded in Paris, he scavenged and sold bottles to survive, but he managed to begin a short novel, “In Evil Hour.”

While working on that book he took time off in 1957 to complete another short novel, “No One Writes the Colonel,” about an impoverished retired army officer, not unlike the author’s grandfather, who waits endlessly for a letter replying to his requests for a military pension. It was published to acclaim four years later. (“In Evil Hour” was also published in the early 1960s.)

Mr. García Márquez alternated between journalism and fiction in the late 1950s. While working for newspapers and magazines in Venezuela, he wrote a short-story collection, “Big Mama’s Funeral,” which incorporates the kind of magical elements he would master in “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” From 1959 to 1961 he supported the Castro revolution and wrote for Prensa Latina, the official Cuban press agency.

In 1961 he moved to Mexico City, where he would live on and off for the rest of his life. It was there, in 1965, after a four-year dry spell in which he wrote no fiction, that Mr. García Márquez began “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” The inspiration for it, he said, came to him while he was driving to Acapulco.

Returning home, he began an almost undistracted 18 months of writing while his wife, Mercedes, looked after the household. “When I was finished writing,” he recalled, “my wife said: ‘Did you really finish it? We owe $12,000.’ ”

With the book’s publication in 1967, in Buenos Aires, the family never owed a penny again. “One Hundred Years of Solitude” was sold out within days.

In following the rise and fall of the Buendía family through several generations of war and peace, affluence and poverty, the novel seemed to many critics and readers the defining saga of Latin America’s social and political history.

Mr. García Márquez made no claim to have invented magic realism; he pointed out that elements of it had appeared before in Latin American literature. But no one before him had used the style with such artistry, exuberance and power. Magic realism would soon inspire writers on both sides of the Atlantic, most notably Isabel Allende in Chile and Salman Rushdie in Britain.

“Reality is also the myths of the common people,” Mr. García Márquez told an interviewer. “I realized that reality isn’t just the police that kill people, but also everything that forms part of the life of the common people.”

He incorporated the magical on the first page, writing of “a heavy Gypsy with an untamed beard and sparrow hands” who would drag two metal ingots from door to door to demonstrate their magically magnetic power.

“And everybody was amazed,” he wrote, “to see pots, pans, tongs and braziers tumble down from their places and beams creak from the desperation of nails and screws trying to emerge.”

In 1973, when General Pinochet overthrew Chile’s democratically elected Marxist president, Salvador Allende, who committed suicide, Mr. García Márquez vowed never to write as long as General Pinochet remained in power.

The Pinochet dictatorship lasted 17 years, but Mr. García Márquez released himself from his vow well before it ended. “I never thought he’d last so long,” he said in a 1997 interview with The Washington Post. “Time convinced me I was wrong. What I was doing was allowing Pinochet to stop me from writing, which means I had submitted to voluntary censorship.”

In 1975 he published his next novel, “The Autumn of the Patriarch,” about a dictator in a phantasmagorical Latin American state who rules for so many decades that nobody can recall what life was like before him. As he had predicted, some critics faulted the work for not matching the artistry of “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” But others raved about it, and it became a global best seller. He called it his best novel.

In “Chronicle of a Death Foretold,” published in 1981, Mr. García Márquez used journalistic techniques to tell a story, apparently drawn from a real incident, in which the brothers of a woman who has lost her virginity murder the man responsible, Santiago Nasar. The brothers announce their intention to avenge their family honor, but because of a variety of odd circumstances, Nasar remains unaware of his impending fate.

“Love in the Time of Cholera,” published in 1985, was Mr. García Márquez’s most romantic novel, the story of the resumption of a passionate relationship between a recently widowed septuagenarian and the lover she had broken with more than 50 years before.

By the 1980s, Mr. García Márquez appeared to have reached the pinnacle of his talent. But with each new work, he complained, he depleted the memories and life experiences that informed his fiction. “I have realized as I grow older that history, in the end, has more imagination than oneself,” he told The New York Times in 1991. “So I find myself working more and more on research.”

“The General in His Labyrinth,” published in 1989, combined imagination with historical fact to conjure up the last days of Simón Bolívar, the father of South America’s independence from Spain. The portrait of the aging Bolívar as a flatulent philanderer, abandoned and ridiculed by his onetime followers, aroused controversy on a continent that viewed him as South America’s version of George Washington. But Mr. García Márquez said his depiction had been drawn from a careful perusal of Bolívar’s personal letters.

As his fame grew, Mr. García Márquez — or Gabo, as he was called by friends — enjoyed a lifestyle he would have found inconceivable in his struggling youth. He kept homes in Mexico City, Barcelona, Paris and Cartagena, on Colombia’s Caribbean coast. He dressed fastidiously, preferring a white monotone encompassing linen suits, shirts, shoes and even watchbands.

He contributed his prestige, time and money to left-wing causes. He helped finance a Venezuelan political party. He served on the Bertrand Russell Tribunal, which investigated human rights violations in Latin America

For more than three decades the State Department denied Mr. García Márquez a visa to travel in the United States, supposedly because he had been a member of the Colombian Communist Party in the 1950s but almost certainly because of his continuing espousal of left-wing causes and his friendships with Mr. Castro. The ban was rescinded in 1995 after President Bill Clinton had invited him to Martha’s Vineyard.

Mr. García Márquez’s ties to Mr. Castro troubled some intellectuals and human rights advocates. Susan Sontag wrote in the 1980s, “To me it’s scandalous that a writer of such enormous talent be a spokesperson for a government which has put more people in jail (proportionately to its population) than any other government in the world.”

He attributed the criticism to what he called Americans’ “almost pornographic obsession with Castro.” But he became sensitive enough about the issue to intercede on behalf of jailed Cuban dissidents.

Suffering from lymphatic cancer, which was diagnosed in 1999, Mr. García Márquez devoted most of his subsequent writing to his memoirs. One exception was the novel “Memories of My Melancholy Whores,” about the love affair between a 90-year-old man and a 14-year-old prostitute, published in 2004.

In July 2012, his brother, Jaime, was quoted as saying that Mr. García Márquez had senile dementia and had stopped writing. “Sometimes I cry because I feel like I’m losing him,” he said. But Jaime Abello, director of the Gabriel García Márquez New Journalism Foundation in Cartagena, said that the condition had not been clinically diagnosed.

Mr. Pera, the author’s editor at Random House Mondadori, said at the time that Mr. García Márquez had been working on a novel, “We’ll See Each Other in August,” but that no publication date had been scheduled. The author seemed disinclined to have it published, Mr. Pera said: “He told me, ‘This far along I don’t need to publish more.’ ”

Dozens of television and film adaptations were made of Mr. García Márquez’s works, but none achieved the critical or commercial success of his writing, and he declined requests for the movie rights to “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” The novel’s readers, he once said, “always imagine the characters as they want, as their aunt or their grandfather, and the moment you bring that to the screen, the reader’s margin for creativity disappears.”

Besides his wife, Mercedes, his survivors include two sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo.

Mr. García Márquez attributed his rigorous, disciplined schedule in part to his sons. As a young father he took them to school in the morning and picked them up in the afternoon. During the interval — from 8 in the morning to 2 in the afternoon — he would write.

“When I finished one book, I wouldn’t write for a while,” he said in 1966. “Then I had to learn how to do it all over again. The arm goes cold; there’s a learning process you have to go through again before you rediscover the warmth that comes over you when you are writing.”

Yet it is far too early to conclude that the worst international crisis for many years has been contained, let alone solved. What has been agreed in Geneva, rather, moves the conflict in and over Ukraine into a new chapter in which we may hope military threats will play a lesser part but which will almost certainly be long and messy.

It is never likely to be free of the danger of regression to the dangerous confrontation that was building in recent days, with Nato deploying forces as close to Russian territory as it feasibly could, and the Russians pushing their units up to the Ukrainian frontier.

Nato's deployments, insofar as any have been completed, were token, while Russia's were much more than that. Now the Russians are apparently to stand down one battalion, a tiny fraction of what they have assembled, and they are ready to stand down more as and when the political process in Ukraine meets with their approval.

This means that Russia's military leverage will remain a very important factor in the situation. The agreement on the involvement of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, welcome though it is, could also be the cause of skirmishing or worse in the future, since Russia will provide some of the monitors on which the maintenance of peace and order in the east may depend. It is absolutely reasonable that it should do so, but it is also not hard to see that there could be differences of interpretation that could lead to major problems.

It is also unclear at this stage how the constitutional process in Ukraine is to be managed. Will the work of the then existing constitutional commission stand? Will the presidential election take place as previously envisaged? How will Ukrainians in the eastern part of the country be consulted about the constitution and about, for example, the option of indicating that they wish to be part of Russia?

Nobody has given up on their aims or hopes for Ukraine, and Russia's leverage remains largely intact. But sense has nevertheless prevailed.

Vladimir Putin said yesterday that "I really hope that I do not have to exercise this right" of entering Ukraine to protect Russian speakers, "and that we are able to solve all today's pressing issues via political and diplomatic means". The contest for Ukraine is not over, but we are in a better place than we were.

The US has promised Ukraine non-lethal military aid after the low morale among the country's soldiers became evident in confrontations with pro-Moscow separatists, but the White House urged the Kiev to act in a “measured and responsible way” in responding to unrest in the east.

The American offer came ahead of today's talks over the fate of eastern Ukraine. Those negotiations began this morning in Geneva amid low expectations and battling narratives over what is going on the ground.

Asked if he is expecting any progress, the US secretary of state, John Kerry, simply shrugged. He held separate meetings this morning at the Intercontinental Hotel with the EU foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, the Ukrainian foreign minister, Andrii Deshchytisa, and his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, before all four began a plenary session.

Deshchytisa said he had come with “optimism and goodwill” but Lavrov did not hold a separate meeting with him. The ballroom set aside for the closing press conference has been decked out with the US star and stripes but no other flags.

The White House press secretary, Jay Carney noted today's Geneva meeting represented the first time for the four foreign ministers, known as the 'contact group', has met since the crisis erupted in February.

He said the US was considering requests from Kiev for support for the army, but stressed it would not be lethal aid in the form of arms or ammunition. Press reports have suggested it would include items like uniforms, but stop short of body armour.

Briefing journalists on Air Force One, Carney, urged restraint on Kiev, saying “It is certainly appropriate for Ukraine to take action to restore law and order, but we believe that they should continue to do so in a measured and responsible way.”

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, left, meets with Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andriy Deshchytsya, right, to discuss the ongoing situation in Ukraine on Thursday in Geneva. Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

GENEVA—Ukraine and Russia, backed by the U.S. and Europe, agreed Thursday to steps to de-escalate tensions, including demobilizing militias, vacating seized government buildings and establishing a political dialogue that could lead to more autonomy for Ukraine's regions.

However the deal left many issues unanswered. It didn't commit Russia to back next month's Ukrainian presidential elections, nor did the U.S. and Europe pledge not to expand their punitive sanctions.

And while it calls for international monitors to "play a leading role in assisting Ukrainian authorities and local communities" on implementing the deal, how that would actually work was unclear.

The chosen group—the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe—has frequently stepped into conflict zones but usually to monitor elections and agreements rather than enforce them. Their officials are unarmed and therefore ultimately depend on persuasion rather than force.

Since Moscow claims it is not behind the actions of the separatists, it may claim it can do nothing to persuade them to back down or surrender their weapons.

The deal doesn't require Russia to pull its troops back from the border with Ukraine, nor to renounce the right Russian President Vladimir Putin reasserted Thursday to send them into Ukraine if Moscow deems it necessary to protect ethnic Russians and Russian speakers there.

Western officials said however that the agreement calls for immediate de-escalation, and it will soon be clear if Moscow abides by the spirit of the accord.

Ukraine's acting Foreign Minister Andriy Deshchytsia gave no pledge of pulling his country's troops back from the eastern regions, where they were sent this week for what his government called an antiterrorist operation. But he said if there is real de-escalation, they "might not be involved in this operation fully."

He said Kiev will give the OSCE time to try and persuade the separatists to disarm and clear government buildings. Kiev authorities "will not use force first."

"The Geneva meeting on the situation in Ukraine agreed on initial concrete steps to de-escalate tensions and restore security," the participants in the talks said in a joint-statement. "All sides must refrain from any violence, intimidation or provocative actions."

As a result of the agreement, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Washington would hold off from imposing new economic sanctions on Russia for now, for what Western countries allege have been the Kremlin's efforts to destabilize Ukraine. He said the U.S. would wait until it could assess whether the situation on the ground was improving.

Russia has denied any meddling in eastern Ukraine, a position also reiterated on Thursday by Mr. Putin.

The EU had already decided to expand the list of Russian officials to whom it applied asset freezes and travel bans following Russia's annexation of Ukraine's Crimea region. It wasn't immediately clear if that will now go ahead. The U.S. extended its list of targeted individuals on Friday.

However the accord will almost certainly sideline for now Europe's consideration of much broader economic sanctions

Mr. Kerry said the Obama administration viewed the agreement as a test of whether Mr. Putin was serious about de-escalating tensions in Ukraine.

"We expect in the next few days…some of these steps need to be seen and be evident," Mr. Kerry said.

The meeting was the highest-level direct talks between Moscow and Kiev since the annexation of Crimea last month. One official said the talks started off tense but quickly grew focused, with Moscow bringing ideas to the table.

Mr. Kerry has held regular talks with Mr. Lavrov on the Kiev crisis since protesters forced out former Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych, a Kremlin ally, in late February. U.S. officials have voiced frustration in the past with Mr. Lavrov, unclear if he had the power to cut deals on behalf of Mr. Putin.

Some protesters in primarily Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine have sought to follow the path of Crimea and hold a referendum on whether to secede from Ukraine.

Two of the biggest issues now are whether Ukraine will back off action against the separatists and if Moscow will relax its opposition to the May 25 election to choose a successor to Mr. Yanukovych, whom Moscow has insisted remains Ukraine's legitimate president. The ballot is seen as key to creating a fully legitimate new government in Kiev.

In his news conference, Mr. Lavrov gave no hint that Moscow would support the vote noting that "there is no mention of this election" in the statement.

Both Mr. Kerry and Ms. Ashton said they received assurances from Ukraine's government, including the president and prime minister, that they were committed to constitutional changes that would give far greater autonomy to Ukraine's regions. They said they believed this process could serve as platform to defusing the political crisis in Ukraine.

Russia should join NATO: the benefits for the Global Security are enormous

To reformulate Lord Ismay's phrase: 1) Take Russia in, 2) Continue keeping Germany down, 3) Assert and exercise the US leadership position within the NATO as a unifying and directing force and vector.

"Ловец Человеков"

Connected? The halo is there. And the Book is there. And the disciples are there. But where is the Light of Understanding, in this big curved dark tunnel of a vision? Where is the big red dot? Where is the new beginning?

Russia and US Presidential Elections of 2016 - Google News

Russia international behavior - Google News

RUSSIA and THE WEST

russia ukraine - Google News

West, Russia, Putin

US - Russia relations - Google News

Hillary Clinton and rock group Pussy Riot

"Great to meet the strong & brave young women from #PussyRiot, who refuse to let their voices be silenced in #Russia. 1:09 PM - 4 Apr 2014" - Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton tweeted a picture Friday of her posing with members of the anti-Vladimir Putin punk rock group Pussy Riot. Clinton met with the women during the "Women in the World Summit" in New York. The group has emerged as chief opponents of Putin, and three members were jailed in 2012 after an anti-Putin performance at a church. The tweet has been re-tweeted almost 10,000 times.